EMC: HP's 'ridiculous' 100TB dedupe claim is bogus

HP's claims that it has "leapfrogged" EMC by deduplicating data at more than three times the rate of its fastest system have been vigorously disputed by EMC.EMC said HP's decision was "puzzling", and argued the comparison was not fair because HP's claim was for four hardware systems working on four storage pools compared to EMC's figures for one system and one pool.

HP's claims that it has "leapfrogged" EMC by deduplicating data at more than three times the rate of its fastest system have been vigorously disputed by EMC.

EMC said HP's decision was "puzzling", and argued the comparison was not fair because HP's claim was for four hardware systems working on four storage pools compared to EMC's figures for one system and one pool. Deduplication, which removes copies of data from storage to improve usage, only works within pools of data.

HP made the 100TB claim in front of hundreds of technical and non-technical journalists at a packed press conference at HP Discover in Las Vegas on Monday.

HP's own specifications state that the best ingest performance — the speed at which a system can cope with data — of HP StoreOnce-enabled B6200 backup appliances working on a single data pool is 25TB per hour.

This compares with the 31TB/hour[PDF] ingest rate of EMC's Data Domain 990 system..

"100TB is almost like, 'Hey we're in Vegas, what's a really big number we can use?'," Emsley said. "I must admit it's been quite amusing."

"Without having a single deduplication namespace or pool, effectively you don't get any benefit on the scalability of the system," Emsley said.

When ZDNet UK asked HP's storage director of product marketing, Sean Kinney, why HP had chosen to make the comparison of the complicated technologies in front of hundreds of journalists, without explicitly saying it was comparing the performance of four coupled bits of kit with a single piece of hardware from EMC, he said because the four pools could be managed by the same HP Fusion Manager software it was a fair comparison.

"This is what we have chosen, this is what we're doing, it is a single system, it is a maximum configuration," he said, noting that HP had decided to compare the maximum possible performance of its dedupe system with that of EMC's.

Storage is fiercely competitive and HP is fighting to take market share away from EMC, via its StoreOnce and 3Par product ranges.